The overhead buzzing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – aka drones – is an increasingly familiar sound in many parts of the world. Whether these helicopter-like devices are flown for fun, military purposes or commercial reasons, the global drone market is predicted to increase annually by nearly 14% between 2020 and 2025. Drones can give operators a birds-eye view of events – including natural disasters – as they unfold. And they can open up difficult-to-access places for emergency supplies to be delivered. This makes them well-suited to help in the response to humanitarian and environmental challenges.

WeRobotics Global has become a premier forum for social good robotics. The feedback featured below was unsolicited. On June 1, 2017, we convened our first, annual global event, bringing together 34 organizations to New York City (full list below) to shape the global agenda and future use of robotics in the social good sector. WeRobotics Global was kindly hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first donor to support our efforts. They opened the event with welcome remarks and turned it over to Patrick Meier from WeRobotics who provided an overview of WeRobotics and the big picture context for social sector robotics.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. As part of DARPA's ALIAS program, this robot arm was able to help land a Boeing 737 in a simulator: The only reason this works at all is because of how heavily automated the aircraft already is. It makes me wonder what the point of the robot arm is at all: Why not just build this stuff into the existing autopilot already, you know?